Behind Convent Walls (Walerian Borowczyk, 1978

Marina Pierro in Behind Convent Walls

Cast: Ligia Branice, Howard Ross, Marina Pierro, Gabriela Giacobbe, Rodolfo Dal Pra, Loredana Martinez, Mario Maranzana, Alex Partexano. Screenplay: Walerian Borowczyk, based on a book by Stendhal. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Film editing: Walerian Borowczyk. Music: Sergio Montori. 

Nuns just wanna have fun, or so Walerian Borwczyk's Behind Convent Walls tells us. What forbids them from doing so is a stern Mother Superior, so when her back is turned they're up to all manner of rebellious behavior, the most lurid of which is perhaps the employment of a hand-carved dildo with an image of Jesus on one end. Ostensibly based on an essay in Stendhal's Promenades de Rome, Borowczyk's film is thought by some to rise above its soft-core prurience by virtue of some creative cinematography and its criticism of clerical celibacy and hypocrisy, but it seems to me not much more than a male fantasy about the lives of inaccessible women.  

Superman (James Gunn, 2025)

David Corenswet in Superman

Cast: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Cathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Alan Tudyk (voice), Bradley Cooper, Angela Sarafyan, Michael Rooker (voice), Pom Klementieff (voice), Maria Gabriela de Faría, Wendell Pierce, Neya Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Zlatko Buric, Jake Tapper. Screenplay: James Gunn. Cinematography: Henry Braham. Production design: Beth Mickle. Film editing: Craig Alpert, William Hoy. Music: David Fleming, John Murphy. 

James Gunn's Superman begins in medias res, with only a minute or two of text on screen to summarize the well-known backstory of the title character. Gunn wastes no time establishing the hero's Kryptonian origins, his secret identity as Clark Kent (David Corenswet) and his relationships with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and his enemy Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). We begin simply with Superman getting the shit beat out of him, which is more than enough to get our attention. The problem with the film, however, is that Gunn takes the opportunity to dispense with the old background narrative and loads down the movie with new characters, off-beat relationships like Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio), multiple threats, and head-spinning sci-fi tropes like "pocket universes." What could have been an exhilarating new take on an old story instead becomes exhausting. Fortunately, Corenswet, Brosnahan, and Hoult are skillful enough players to rise above the frenzy and bring some order to the chaos of ideas that Gunn throws at them. 

Countdown (Robert Altman, 1967)

James Caan in Countdown

Cast: James Caan, Joanna Moore, Robert Duvall, Barbara Baxley, Charles Aidman, Steven Ihnat, Michael Murphy, Ted Knight, Stephen Coit, John Rayner, Charles Irving, Bobby Riha. Screenplay: Loring Mandel, based on a novel by Hank Searls. Cinematography: William W. Spencer. Art direction: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Leonard Rosenman. 

Reality intervened to make Countdown obsolete within a few months after it was released, so that the scenes of the astronaut played by James Caan plodding across the lunar surface -- instead of bouncing on it as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would soon be seen doing -- look ridiculous. Countdown is watchable today mainly for the people involved with it who went on to better things. Caan and Robert Duvall were just a few years away from stardom thanks to The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and even Ted Knight, who plays a NASA press relations man, would find a better journalistic role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. But it was almost the undoing of its director, Robert Altman, who was fired by Warner Bros. for what became one of his signature techniques: overlapping dialogue. What energy and interest Countdown generates comes from Altman's ability to keep things moving, but he's saddled with a tired story about the space race with the usual cliches, including the astronaut's anxious wife, played woodenly by Joanna Moore. 

Undercurrent (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

Fujiko Yamamoto in Undercurrent

Cast: Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Eitaro Ozawa, Michiko Ai, Eijiro Tono, Kazuko Ichikawa, Michiko Ono, Kimiko Tachibana, Mineko Yorozuyo, Keiko Kawasaki. Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Hisao Sawano. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Shigeo Nishida. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kozaburo Yoshimura's Undercurrent (aka Night River) is a romantic melodrama somewhat in the manner of Douglas Sirk, in which a strong woman is troubled by the expectations of the men in her life, including her father, her colleagues, her suitors, and her lover. Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) has built a career as a textile designer when she meets a university professor, Takemura (Ken Uehara), whose wife is an invalid. Their relationship causes a mild scandal, and his wife's death awakens qualms of conscience in Kiwa, just as her career is reaching new levels of success. In an American "woman's picture" of the 1950s, which Undercurrent strongly resembles, the choice between love and career might have easily been resolved in favor of love, but the changes in the role of women in postwar Japan produce a distinctly different effect. Handsomely filmed by Kazuo Miyagawa in a muted palette in which splashes of primary color stand out vividly, Undercurrent benefits from Yamamoto's thoughtful, sensitive performance. 

Loving Couples (Mai Zetterling, 1964)

Harriet Andersson, Gio Petré, and Gunnel Lindblom in Loving Couples

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gio Petré, Anita Björk, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Jan Malmsjö, Lissi Alandh, Bengt Brunskog, Anja Boman, Åke Grönberg. Heinz Hopf. Screenplay: Mai Zetterling, David Hughes, based on a novel by Agnes von Krusentjerna. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Jan Boleslaw. Film editing: Paul Davies. Music: Roger Wallis. 

Mail Zetterling's first film as director, Loving Couples, almost collapses under the weight of exposition and subtext. It centers on three women about to give birth in a gloomy Swedish hospital in the first year of World War I. One of the women, Angela (Gio Petré), is unwed but doesn't care; another, Agda (Harriet Andersson), is married to a gay man who isn't the father, and is perfectly happy about it; the third, Adele (Gunnel Lindblom), is told that the child she's carrying, fathered by her husband, whom she doesn't love, is dead. All of them wound up in this condition on or about Midsummer's Eve on an opulent estate. The film first wanders back through their several girlhoods and then spends a good deal of time bringing us up to the day they were impregnated. The tone of the film ranges from giddy to gloomy as it explores religious bigotry, sexual freedom, societal hypocrisy, mindless militarism, and predatory behavior, among other topics. It almost flies apart at several of its narrative turns, but somehow Zetterling manages to hold it together. 

Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker, 1976)

Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone

Cast: Scott Baio, Florence Garland, Jodie Foster, John Cassisi, Martin Lev, Paul Murphy, Sheridan Earl Russell, Albin "Humpty" Jenkins. Screenplay: Alan Parker. Cinematography: Peter Biziou, Michael Seresin. Production design: Geoffrey Kirkland. Film editing: Gerry Hambling. Music: Paul Williams.

It could almost be a scene from the Apple+ series The Studio: 

"I got an idea: a spoof of Warner Bros. gangster movies."

"Nah, I think it's been done." 

"So what if we make it a musical?"

"Hmm. Tell me more."

"We could have it performed by kids!"

"Not bad. But what about the violence? You can't have kids gunning down kids." 

"Yeah ... oh, wait! We could have the machine guns fire whipped cream!"

"Huh. You mean like those old movies with the custard pie fights?"

"Yeah. We could have a big pie fight at the end!" 

"Great! Let's greenlight it!"

It didn't happen that way, of course. It was all Alan Parker's idea -- or bad idea, depending on how you respond to Bugsy Malone. I for one find it a bit creepy, with all those prepubescent chorus girls like something out of Jeffrey Epstein's fever dreams. But there are those who love it and find it perfectly innocent in execution. And it does have Jodie Foster's performance in what would have been the Joan Blondell role: the hard-bitten chorus girl with a heart. The 13-year-old Foster gives it all the sass Blondell would have given it. The songs, by Paul Williams, are clever enough, and fortunately they're dubbed, so we don't have to listen to them sung in childish treble. Most critics, with Pauline Kael a decided exception, liked it, and it was a hit in Britain, where it was filmed. Maybe the best thing about it is that it started no trend toward kiddie spoof movies.  

Streetwise (Na Jiazuo, 2021)

Li Jiuxiao and Huang Miyi in Streetwise

Cast: Li Jiuxiao, Huang Miyi, Yu Ailei, Yao Lu, Sha Baoliang. Screenplay: Na Jiazuo. Cinematography: Li Jia Neng. Film editing: Jinlei Kong. 

Bleak in concept but often lush in execution, Na Jiazuo's debut feature, Streetwise, centers on the lives of three young people in a city in Sichuan in 2004. Dong Zi (Li Jiuxiao) works with his friend Xi Jun (Yu Ailei) as a debt collector for a man known as Mr. Four (Sha Baoliang), getting beat up as often as not by the people they try to collect money from. Dong Zi takes on this unpleasant job to pay the hospital bills for his father (Yao Lu), who is a handful of his own, constantly in trouble for gambling. Unfortunately, Dong Zi also has a bent for trouble, getting involved with Mr. Four's ex-wife, Jiu'er (Huang Miyi), who runs a tattoo parlor. Streetwise is narratively somewhat choppy, and it takes patience and attention to sort out the connections among the characters, but it repays that attention with some vivid characterization and a real feeling for the atmosphere of a dead-end city.   

Chongqing Hot Pot (Yang Qing, 2016)

Cast: Chen Kun, Bai Baihe, Qin Hao, Yu Entai. Screenplay: Yang Qing, Zhang Enming, Zhang Shimao. Cinematography: Liao Ni. Art direction: Lin Mu. Film editing: Li Nanyi. Music: Peng Fei, Zhao Yingjun. 

Liu Bo (Chen Kun) and his buddies Xu Dong (Qin Hao) and Four Eyes (Yu Entai) get caught in the middle of a bank heist in the hyperviolent comedy Chongqing Hot Pot. The guys, who run a hot pot restaurant in a former bomb shelter, discover that they share an easily penetrated wall with a bank, and the passage leads straight to the vault. Liu Bo is having difficulties with the gambling debt he owes a mobster, so the temptation to take the cash lying out on a table in the vault is intense. But that cash has coincidentally become the target of some robbers who, wearing masks, try to pull off a daylight heist. Also coincidentally, a pretty young woman (Bai Baihe) whom the guys knew in middle school works in the bank, adding a romantic subplot to the movie. Yang Qing doesn't quite tie up all the loose ends of this complicated story, and Chongqing Hot Pot is a little darker than it needs to be, but there are some amusing moments. 

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006)

Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion

Cast: Woody Harrelson, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Tim Russell, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin. Screenplay: Garrison Keillor, Ken LaZebnik. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Jacob Craycroft. Music: Garrison Keillor. 

Garrison Keillor used to be celebrated as a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and James Thurber, crafting stories out of the regional American experience with his best-selling tales of Lake Wobegon, Minn. and hosting a public radio show with a devoted following. His descent into obscurity came, like many others, with charges of inappropriate sexual behavior, but it's a mark of how famous he once was that a feature film with a starry cast was built around his radio show. A Prairie Home Companion was Robert Altman's last feature, and it demonstrates his ability to direct an ensemble of vivid characters. The thread of story concerns the final broadcast of the show, brought about by the purchase of the theater by a large Texas corporation. Somehow, a mysterious figure in a white trench coat, played by Virginia Madsen and billed in the credits as "Dangerous Woman," is inserted into the plot, as is the character of Guy Noir, the private eye played on the radio by Keillor but in the film by Kevin Kline. But the point of the movie is really to have the stars show off. Keillor's owlish presence is what holds the movie together, and the cast seems to be having fun. Whether the audience does too seems to be a matter of taste. I admit that I never appreciated Keillor's humor. It always seemed to contain a whiff of condescension to the residents of Lake Wobegon and the old-fashioned down-home music on his show, a kind of smirky folksiness, and that mars the film for me. 

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill in Possession

Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton, Michael Hogben, Maximilien Rüthlein. Screenplay: Andrzej Zulawski, Frederic Tuten. Cinematography: Bruno Nuytten. Art direction: Holger Gross. Film editing: Marie-Sophie Dubus, Suzanne Lang-Willar. Music: Andrzej Korzynski. 

As if the story of a woman possessed by ... something weren't enough, Andrzej Zulawski tells it with such feverish restlessness that Possession exhausts the audience well before its frenzied climax. Two men can't have a conversation without at least one of them bobbing and weaving or swiveling in a desk chair. Yet somehow this most hyperactive of horror movies makes its impact, putting its leads, Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, through hell. To what point other than touching a viewer's every nerve? The Berlin setting, smack up against the Wall, suggests a political subtext reflected in the apocalyptic ending, and the dialogue is riddled with references to God and Faith and Chance, but I tend to think that in this case the mannerism is the message.